Adrienne Mayor

Adrienne Mayor is a historian of ancient science and folklore at Stanford University, where she has been a research scholar in the Classics department and the History and Philosophy of Science program since 2006. Her work looks at how ancient people explained and imagined things that modern science studies.

Her books include The First Fossil Hunters, on how Greek and Roman myths of griffins and giants may reflect fossil finds; Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, on ancient biological and chemical warfare; The Poison King, a biography of Mithridates VI that was a National Book Award finalist; and The Amazons.

In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (2018) she argues that Greek myths imagined artificial life long before anyone could build it. She treats Talos, the bronze guardian of Crete with a single vein of ichor, as one of the earliest imagined robots, and Hephaestus' self-moving tripods and golden maidens as early visions of automata and artificial intelligence: made things that move, respond and serve.